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Ok, hear me out here. Why did I jump straight from Highly Responsive to Prayers to Lotus Land Story? Well, to be quite honest, I despise playing Story of Eastern Wonderland to the point where I don't even have the will to get past stage 3, but want to be able to say something of actual value in these posts, so I'm skipping it so I don't have to play more of it to form more of a coherent opinion, and while Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream seems potentially interesting, Neko Project refuses to run it for me specifically for some reason, so for now, Lotus Land Story it is (although, if you want to know my impression of PoDD despite the fact I've never played it, I think the story and characters seem really cool, and some of the music is pretty good (especially Sailor of Time)). This is a weird one for me, as when I can get it to work, it's a genuinely fun and enjoyable game, but for some reason, Neko Project refuses to smoothly run this one in particular for me, except for the one single time when it ran without any lag whatsoever, so it's rare that I get to enjoy it. That being said, when it does work, it's actually a genuinely fun time, and one I'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who can figure out how to make it run smoothly. The game itself is a fairly solid bullet hell, without anything exceptionally good or bad gameplay-wise that's worth mentioning, although it is noteworthy for being the origin point of a lot of future staples of the series, such as the focus button, counter-bombing, and Marisa as the secondary main character. Additionally, I also noticed how... weirdly easy it was. I managed to 1cc the game as Reimu on normal mode on my first try, and for context, the only Windows-era Touhou games I've been able to 1cc are EoSD and PCB, where I turned the starting lives all the way up, and MoF, which is a game I specifically went out of my way to practice at so I could 1cc it, so this isn't something I would normally be able to do. Whether that's good or bad is up to you, but I felt it was worth mentioning. Anyway, yippee woohoo story! There are youkai getting funky in Gensokyo, Reimu and Marisa go to a big lake in the mountains, and then they go under the lake into a wacky new world that has a big mansion in it. Fairly standard Touhou stuff, really, and nearly identical to SoEW's story, except better by virtue of the fact something is actually accomplished by the end, and also the fact that it's not SoEW. That being said, despite its simplicity, there are still a lot of things here I genuinely enjoy. Stuff like Elly having to reluctantly admit she let the other character get past her too regardless of who you're playing as is pretty funny to me, and the lead-up to Reimu and Marisa's fight as well as the whole chase sequence with Yuuka in stage 6 are both genuinely cool moments that make this game feel much more enjoyable to me. Its story is simple, yes, but that doesn't mean there's not a lot here to like. Oh, and this game introduces Yuuka. I really like Yuuka. That is all. Also, the soundtrack! I haven't listened to all of PoDD's soundtrack, so I don't know how much of this applies there, but LLS really feels like the point where ZUN truly got the hang of using the PC-98 to create music, and there's a lot of songs here I really like. Bad Apple is an obvious one, but Decoration Battle goes unreasonably hard for a stage 1 boss theme, and Sleeping Terror and Faint Dream ~ Inanimate Dream are both great themes for Yuuka, even if I do slightly prefer Sleeping Terror. Vessel of Stars ~ Casket of Star is also another fantastic theme from this game, and possibly my favorite piece of music in the whole thing, and while it is a little hard to listen to this game's version of Maiden's Capriccio now without comparing it to its other (in my opinion) more enjoyable versions from future games, there's a reason it's been brought back as many times as it has, even if I do slightly prefer Vessel of Stars over it. I'd like to balance this post out a bit by mentioning something I don't like about this game, but honestly, nothing comes to mind for me. There's the lag, I guess, but that feels more like an issue on my end than something that would have been present on the original hardware, and that aside, I really can't think of anything I don't like here. Overall, Lotus Land Story is a great game in my opinion, and definitely worth checking out if you can get it to run smoothly. I have no idea what I did on the one singular occasion where it ran perfectly for me without any issues, but if anyone has any advice, do please let me know, I'd love to play more of this game, including the extra stage, which I've never actually gotten a chance to touch.

It's out. Grab it here or wait for the steam page to eventually show up as the trial is free anyways. Yes this is a torrent so you need qbittorrent or something else to download it properly.

Here's a fun and intriguing topic. When one has put the effort into deciding upon an online alias, it's natural to wonder about the origins of the other names around you. Most often, a username is inspired by some life experience, personal interest, or inside joke, and thus can function as an amusing glimpse into someone's personality. Even the more impulsive choices reflect something of the user's mindset. In my early internet days, I used the moniker of "Thomas the Traveler," inspired by the triple T acronym I had adopted as a postscript (actually stands for "Truth Told Today"). For less interactive accounts, I utilized an old childhood nickname "Yozia;" this is still in use in a few places, such as my Bandcamp profile. As I became more active online, I wanted something that sounded more like a proper name; "Hisuag" was a bizarre misspelling applied to me at a job, and the situation was memorable enough to occur to me as a humorous possibility. As for "Ken" . . . I actually don't remember. Mayhap it was another instance of someone getting my name wrong (which happens fairly often).

As the title suggests, I've decided to do a little thing on here every so often where I talk about every official Touhou game I can be bothered to say anything about in order of release, starting, of course, with Embodiment of Scarlet De- I mean Highly Responsive to Prayers! Man this game is weird idk how I feel about it I have no idea what the general fandom consensus on this game is, so I have no idea if this will be met with a "yeah obviously" or a "how dare you", but this game is... strange, and I don't know if I like it or not. I think I do? I probably do. Anyway, on the one hand, when it's at its best, it can be surprisingly fun and enjoyable to play, and even this early on there were still a handful of bangers in the soundtrack (Magic Mirror my beloved), but on the other, there are lots of moments in this game where you're stuck batting the yin-yang orb around for what feels like forever trying to hit that one single tile you have left, or on the later boss fights, stuck between choosing to attack and inevitably lose a life or continue dodging bullets and never get a chance to attack. Speaking of which, though, I do think the boss fights are the best parts of this game. While the actual stages can range from inoffensive at best to mildly inconvenient and annoying at worst, I had by far the most fun against the bosses. Their fight themes are all great, and although the fact it's occasionally possible to get stuck faced with an onslaught of bullets it's literally impossible to dodge, the fact the game allows you to retry them as many times as you like does help in making them not too frustrating. They're also where the yin-yang orb gameplay is at its best for me, having to balance attacking and dodging (something that only really gets annoying against Sariel and Konngara and is quite a fun game of risk and reward up until that point) against a target that's big enough to be able to aim for with decent consistency, and without any obstructions to get in your way. Admittedly, I can't actually beat Sariel or Konngara, so the fact I don't like those fights could very well just be a skill issue on my end, but oh well. The rest of the game is... less good, admittedly. There's nothing really all that fun about trying to hit the tiles in the normal stages, nor are there any real decisions to be made, you just kind of keep going until you eventually win. The normal stages are all really easy, too, with the only difference between the early and later ones being that the later ones are all mildly more annoying, without really providing anything more in terms of an actual challenge. Thankfully, though, "mildly annoying" is the worst they ever get, and they're not bad enough to hugely detract from the overall experience. Overall, it's definitely an odd game, and one that definitely shows its age more than even the later PC-98 games that came after it, but at the very least worth going back to, if not for a look at where the series started then just for the honestly quite fun boss fights. Fuck Kikuri's first attack phase, though. The rest of her fight is quite fun, but that first phase can go die for all I care. At least I get to listen to Magic Mirror during it, though.

Around 1.5 years ago I listened to a new (for me) pair of singers called KMNZ, specifically a song called "R U GAME". I really liked it, to the point where I used it as my ringtone for a while. But I never listened to a lot of songs from them. I was scrolling my music library recently and saw the song, so I decided to listen to more of their songs/covers.